I Knew She Was Beautiful

PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer's mother... Writer remembers holding her hand at a train depot as a small boy, and realizing that she was beautiful... Describes watching her with other models in a dressing room... he loved to go to Hollywood Park, and we went to the last race because admission was free. I loved to go, too, and not just because of the horses, the earth shuddering under me as they left the gate and pounded across the finish line. I liked to collect the bet stubs like baseball cards, the losers thrown down, a trail of litter that began in the parking lot until it carpeted the grandstands.... She was seeing this one man. Years later, I learned that she’d been seeing him for some time, even before she and my father divorced, which was soon after I was born. His voice was loud by design, the way a horn is loud. She used to ask me, Do you like him? He took us to baseball games... My mom was a Mexican and my mom was divorced, and one time a girl told me her mom didn’t like mine and she didn’t like me, either. I didn’t hang out with too many kids. Though the modelling jobs weren’t around anymore, the pretty clothes were. Bills came in the mail daily. I answered the phone and a bill collector would ask for her and I’d say she wasn’t home even if she was. She was working for a dentist who was a Mormon, and she was dating him, too, and two old biddies started coming to our door lecturing my mom, and I listened to them with her. I answered their questions because she didn’t know the answers. She wanted to become a Mormon, she didn’t care how... One night I was watching TV when a man who my mom worked for, someone I think she’d also gone out with, came to the door screaming about her. She was out on a date. He was wailing about money, what had she done with his money... Writer describes his alienation from his mother, and, years later, having a dream about her, then learning that she was in a hospital and not expected to live... He travelled to the hospital... It was such a telenovela deathbed scene, mother and son, both weeping about a psychic conversation routed hundreds of miles through the smog and traffic and over the mountains and across three deserts, from one dream to another, so that we wouldn’t miss telling each other for the last time before she died. She was as stunned as I was, as happy. You know? She kept nodding, looking at me, crying. Oh, Mom, I said.